New hope for Sydney's future shape

A great new experiment is about to begin in Sydney planning. The Greater Sydney Commission is about to begin work.

Planning in NSW has for many years been something of a contradiction in terms. The Baird government, encouraged no doubt by renewed interest in Canberra in the fate of Australia's cities, appears to be trying to turn a new page on that troubled past. Doubts have been expressed about handing planning powers to an unelected body. But, as in other fields – the drawing of electoral boundaries and the management of interest rates spring to mind – politicians are sometimes not the best people to make the decisions which the community needs.

An early taskof the greater Sydney Commission will be to revamp the Olympic Park, Homebush, area.

The commission will take over decisions on rezoning currently made by the minister. Given the delicate, at times scandalous, relationship between developers and political parties, an independent planning authority is at least worth trying.

The commission's job will be to set the broader rules – district plans – within which developments are approved by individual councils. In this era of council amalgamations it is interesting that the commission has done some de facto amalgamating of its own to form six districts – with a commissioner for each – covering greater Sydney. Sydney City Council, for example, falls in a district which stretches from Strathfield LGA in the west to Woollahra, Waverley and Randwick in the east.

In devising district plans, the commission's job should be to help reimagine the way Sydney lives. Here, transport is crucial.

An early task will be to revamp the Olympic Park area. The die was cast early in that precinct with the decision to connect it to the rail network with only a spur line. On special days (during the Olympics, for example) the normal timetable can be set aside temporarily to transport large numbers of people by direct train from the city. At other times a branch-line service operates to Lidcombe, where passengers must change trains to reach other parts of the network. For many this is too hard; they choose to drive instead.

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Current plans set aside the precinct for medium- and high-density development. As the regular gridlock at the Underwood Road-Homebush Bay Drive roundabout shows, even the modest extent of development to date now overloads surrounding roads. The government has been under pressure to widen roads and increase parking – the usual precursors to urban blight. Rightly, it has chosen instead to build a light rail line from Strathfield through Olympic Park to Westmead and Carlingford, which should alleviate the problem. But a heavy rail line integrated better into the network right from the start, and with more intermediate stations, might have avoided the problem altogether.

The example illustrates a point which will decide whether the commission succeeds or fails. Transport planning is fundamental to the planning of everything else. Yet in NSW, transport and infrastructure are managed separately from planning. The Coalition government in its early days showed at least that it understood all transport should be run by the one department, so that expensive infrastructure projects for all modes of transport could be assigned a priority according to their worth.

When Gladys Berejiklian was made transport minister it was made explicit that Roads, under Duncan Gay, was a subordinate portfolio. Ms Berejiklian's superior energy and political ability ensured that the spirit of that arrangement was carried through in practice, so that the roads lobby was less able to bulldoze – literally and figuratively – the planning of transport.

Whether the present Transport Minister, Andrew Constance, a more junior minister than Mr Gay, can maintain his predecessor's authority is not so clear. The creeping takeover of the transport agenda by vastly expensive road projects of questionable merit such as WestConnex suggests the bad old days are on their way back. It may be to the commission's advantage here that the departmental head of Transport is one of its members – along with the heads of Planning and Treasury.

Whether that will empower the commission or hobble it as it negotiates its relationship with those who plan transport in Sydney and NSW cannot yet be known. Let us hope for Sydney's sake it does the former, so that the commission can align transport priorities for Sydney with those of the rest of the community. And for its important work, we wish the commission the best of luck.